When Things Fall Away, You Remain

A bare tree at dusk with the first light of the next morning implied on the horizon

We started this series back at the beginning of the season with a tree full of leaves and a question about what happens when things start coming loose.

Twenty-six posts later, here’s where I’ve landed, and it’s simpler than I expected when I started writing.

Everything came off, and you’re still there.

Take the inventory

Think about what’s actually fallen away from your life. Not this fall necessarily. All of it.

The people who were supposed to be permanent. Versions of your body. A faith you had at nineteen that couldn’t hold the weight of what happened at thirty-four. Jobs, houses, towns, plans, whole futures you had already furnished in your mind. Certainties you’d have sworn on.

Now notice who is reading this sentence.

That’s not a trick. That’s the finding. Every single thing you were certain you could not survive losing, you have survived losing, and here you are on a Wednesday reading a blog post by a therapist in Kentucky.

What “you remain” does not mean

It doesn’t mean unchanged. You’ve been rearranged by some of that, and some of it left a ridge in the bark that’s never going away.

It doesn’t mean the losses were fine. A lot of them weren’t, and no amount of survival on your part converts a wrong thing into a good one. Those are two separate ledgers and I won’t mix them.

It doesn’t mean you’re finished. There’s more coming. More shedding, more bare seasons, another October.

What it means is that there’s something in you that persists through all of it, and that something is not made out of the things that keep falling off.

What’s been doing the persisting

I’ve thought about this a lot, sitting with people in the worst weeks of their lives.

Part of it is just biology, and I’d never dismiss that. A body that keeps repairing, a nervous system that keeps trying to find its way back to baseline, a brain built to heal in the right conditions. You’re made out of material that wants to live.

Part of it is other people. Almost nobody survives the worst thing alone, and if you look back at your hardest stretch there’s usually somebody in the frame. A friend, a grandmother, a coach, a stranger at exactly the right minute. Family is who you want it to be, not necessarily who’s blood.

And part of it, in my view, is that you were made on purpose by somebody who has not let go once in this whole process, including the stretches where you couldn’t feel a thing and said so out loud.

You don’t have to agree with that last part for the rest of it to be true. I’m telling you where I stand because that’s what I’ve promised to do in this space.

What to carry out of this season

Grieve what you lost without converting it into a verdict about yourself. Loss is an event. It’s not an assessment of your worth, though it does an outstanding impression of one.

Let the seam form before the tear. Decide your limits while you’re calm. Screen door, not brick wall.

Rest in a way that’s dormant and not withering. You’re building next year’s buds right now whether you can feel it or not.

Quit grading your timeline against somebody else’s hillside. Nothing out there is on the same schedule and not one of those trees is late.

Keep tending and stop forcing. Prepare the ground, then let it come up on its own.

Hold the open questions without manufacturing terrible answers to fill them. Forty feet of road is enough to drive on.

And be a little more curious than you have been about the fact that you’re still standing.

The last thing I want to say

If you’ve read all twenty-six of these, you’ve been in something this fall. Nobody reads a series about things falling away out of general interest.

I don’t know what yours is. But I know the shape of it from the inside, and I know that the part where you’re sitting in the bare part wondering whether anything comes back is the loneliest stretch of the whole thing.

It comes back. Not the same, and not on your schedule, and not because you earned it. It comes back because that’s how the whole thing is built, and I’ve watched it happen enough times now that I’ve stopped treating it as a coincidence.

You are not crazy. You’ve got some unresolved crappy life experiences shaping how you see things right now, and they can be filed correctly, and you do not have to do it by yourself.

It’s an honor and a privilege to hold your hand while you walk through the ashes and help you sift for your beauty. That’s the truest sentence I know about this work, and it’s how I’d like to close out the fall.

The leaves came down. You’re still here. Let’s see what spring does.

This is education, not therapy. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and you’ve been sitting in the bare part by yourself, you don’t have to. Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

Forgiveness Does Not Require Reconciliation